The Mac Experience
Introduction
In my earlier post on the MacBook, I mentioned that it’d be difficult to cover the Mac experience in one post, so I’ve decided to write a regular feature on the Mac Experience. Today we’ll start by taking a brief look at the MacOS X desktop.
Type
Leopard, the latest incarnation of the MacOS X is absolutely gorgeous to look at. The first thing that you’ll notice is that the type on Leopard’s desktop are anti aliased by default and they are very soothing to the eyes. I’ve tried using ClearType on Windows previously but I feel Leopard’s implementation is far superior than Windows’. This could possibly be due to the choice of fonts used on both the operating system which appears drastically different when they are smoothen. Leopard also applies a very effective drop shadowing to the type which makes it even more visible to the eye.
The Dock
The desktop consist of 3 main areas, the actual desktop where your icons resides, the menu bar as well as the Dock. The Dock is similar to Windows’ Task Bar which keeps track of all the running applications as well as holding short cuts to commonly used applications. Active applications in the Dock are indicated by a small light under the app’s icon. Upon a closer look, the Dock panel actually reflects not only the icons on it but any applications that hovers above it. You may customize the Dock’s appearance by moving it to the either 3 sides of the desktop, turning off magnification as well as changing the size of the icons on the dock. To add a new shortcut to the Dock, simply drag the application’s icon to the Dock and the short cut will automatically be created.
As with all the previous versions of MacOS X, Leopard uses high resolution Portable Network Graphic (or PNG for short) for their icons. PNGs support a much higher resolution and color depth than Windows’ ICO format as well as an alpha channel that allows for transparency value for each colored pixel. This results in very high definition icons with smooth transparency effects as seen on the dock image above. There are literally dozens of sites out there that offers icons for the MacOS X free for download and most of these are professionally designed. I’ve included some of these resources at the bottom of this post and feel free to suggest any other good sites to grab icons.
Stacks
One of the newer features introduced in Leopard is the Stacks. Stacks are basically folders that reside in the Dock which expands into a “fan” as you click on it revealing files that are stored in them. There are options to set the Stack to always open in the fan mode displaying the latest item at the bottom of the Stack or opening them in the Grid mode which displays all the files in a iconized grid layout.
A closed Stack by default displays an icon of the latest item added to the folder, so if you had downloaded a PDF file from the Internet, a thumbnail of it would appear as the Stack icon on the Dock. You have the option of always displaying the folder icon instead of the thumbnail. You may add as many Stacks as you want onto the Dock and you can also remove the Documents and Downloads stacks which are created by default. I find that this feature actually saves me time looking for my latest downloads instead of me opening the folder and sorting the files by date. The thumbnail generated helps me identify the files even quicker.
Minimized windows are animated to shrink to the Dock and appears as an thumbnail of that window, so if you have multiple minimized windows of Firefox, having a thumbnail may help you pull up the window that you are looking for. Right clicking on these icons will provide you with context sensitive menus allowing you to quit the application or call up other functions. So far I have found all these little touches to the desktop to be very cool and they actually help serve a purpose. Initially I wasn’t too familiar with how the Dock operates but after using it for a couple of days, I would say that the implementation of the Dock actually feels natural and intuitive. Next up we’ll look at the Leopard’s equivalent of the Windows Explorer, the Finder.
Here are some of sites that has hundreds of high quality PNG icons for use on your Leopard desktop.
PixelGirl
Apple -Icon Downloads
Icons.cx
InterfaceLift - Icons
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